Print Shop Quote Automation
Turn calls, forms, emails and messy messages into structured print quote drafts, with missing-spec flags before anything reaches the customer. Open source, free to self-host.
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No credit card required. The app itself lives at pro.printshopcrm.com.
Quoting is where most print shops actually lose time and money. Not because pricing is hard, but because every job arrives as a loose message, a blurry art file and a half-finished conversation, and someone senior has to reconstruct the whole request before they can price it.
Automation here does not mean a robot sending prices to customers. It means the request arrives structured, the obvious assumptions are already applied, and a human approves a draft instead of writing one from a blank page.
Where quoting actually breaks
Worth naming precisely, because the fix is different for each one and generic CRM software addresses none of them.
- The request is incomplete. Sizes, garment, decoration method, colour count per location, deadline and artwork status are rarely all present in the first message.
- The person who can price it is the busiest person in the building, so quotes queue behind production.
- Pricing lives partly in a spreadsheet and partly in someone head, so two people quote the same job differently.
- Nobody chases the quote after it is sent, and quiet quotes are where most of the lost revenue sits.
Structure the request before anyone prices it
The single highest-value step is refusing to let an underspecified job reach the pricing stage.
- Intake forms per job type, so a screen-print run and an embroidery order ask different questions.
- Paste an inbound email and it becomes a structured draft order, review-first by default rather than auto-sent.
- An AI receptionist can capture calls and messages, and a deterministic parser handles it with no AI key at all.
- Missing specs are flagged explicitly rather than silently guessed. Uncertainty gets escalated, not averaged.
Price it the way your shop prices
Automation is worthless if it produces numbers your shop does not stand behind, so the pricing layer is deliberately yours.
- A calculator that understands screens, colours per location, run length, rush tiers and automatic underbase on darks.
- Or your own price matrices: name the sheet, write your own row and column headings, type your prices. Import the spreadsheet you already use.
- Every line of one estimate can cite a different matrix, so a mixed job prices correctly instead of being split into three quotes.
- A blank cell means you do not price that combination, and the quote says so rather than inventing a number.
The part everyone skips: after the send
Most quote automation stops at the send. That is the half that does not make money.
- Quotes that went quiet are ranked by value, so the biggest silent one surfaces first.
- Follow-up sequences run on the ones nobody chased, and pause the moment a human replies.
- Approval is a no-login link for the customer, so approving is one click rather than an account.
- An approved quote becomes a job, a work ticket and an invoice without anybody retyping it.
Quote against what the job will really cost
A fast wrong quote is worse than a slow right one, which is why costing sits inside quoting rather than in a report you read later.
- A press prints roughly a quarter to a third of the clock, so raw hourly labour costing understates the real number by around three times.
- Job costs run against your shop actual utilisation, and you see the margin while the price is still editable.
- Per-size upcharges flow from the grid through to the ticket, the PDF and the export, so quantity and the grid cannot disagree.
Common Questions
Can quote automation use our own pricing?
Yes, and it should. You can encode shop pricing rules and assumptions in the calculator, or build price matrices with your own headings and numbers. Nothing forces your prices into a fixed model.
Will it send prices to customers automatically?
Not by default, and we would not recommend it. The system produces a draft with missing information flagged; a person approves it. Automating the send is how shops end up honouring a quote they never checked.
What happens with an unusual job?
It gets escalated. The system is built to flag uncertainty rather than pretend every order is simple, and blocks a send when sizes, blanks, artwork, colours or deadlines are unclear.
Does it chase quotes that go quiet?
Yes. Unapproved quotes are ranked by value and can run follow-up sequences over email and SMS, which pause automatically when a human replies.
What does it cost?
Self-hosted, nothing. PrintShopCRM is AGPL-3.0 with public source, no per-seat pricing and no feature tiers. Hosting and setup are available separately.